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- Microsoft says AI rival Anthropic could have ‘disastrous impact’ on ...
Mustafa Suleyman says he believes the AI giant is in effect teaching Claude it "may be conscious". [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - An Existential Crisis in Math
In late July, one of the world’s most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a “turbulent period,” the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall at the International Congress of Mathematicians. AI is getting so good at math, he said, that it’s causing a “crisis in our mathematical values and practices.”Earlier in the same week that Tao gave his talk at math’s most prestigious conference, a researcher at Anthropic had used Claude to disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture. Still, when I asked mathematicians at the conference about their experiences with AI, most hadn’t thought deeply about the topic. Many seemed a little surprised that a journalist was asking them about it at all.Now mathematicians are paying attention. Last week, OpenAI announced that its bots had cracked the Navier–Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems regarded as among the grandest challenges in the field. Navier–Stokes has stumped mathematicians since the 1930s: “It’s a career-killing problem—you can spend all your career doing it and never get the solution,” David Dritschel, a mathematician at the University of St. Andrews, told me. OpenAI said its swarm of 10,000 AI agents solved the problem in less than four days.In the math world, the initial shock over OpenAI’s result has morphed into something of an existential reckoning for the discipline. Although OpenAI was able to solve the Navier–Stokes problem only by pulling from nearly a century’s worth of human efforts, academics are realizing just how much power the AI industry now has over math. “We’re seeing how swiftly an entire field can be ravaged by AI,” Max Weinreich, a math professor at CUNY Baruch, told me.OpenAI’s breakthrough is as notable as how it was achieved. The night before OpenAI announced its solution, the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster released a statement alleging that he had been scooped by OpenAI. With the heavy assistance of AI tools, Buckmaster and his collaborator, Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic), had made major progress toward solving the Navier–Stokes problem. Buckmaster implied that OpenAI might have copied their approach by accessing his messages with OpenAI’s agents. “Almost nobody else I know of was working on it,” he wrote.In an announcement the next day, OpenAI said that it had tasked its AI systems to work on all of the Millennium Problems after hearing rumors that Anthropic had solved two of them.… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - It’s All Fun and Games Until You Give AI Your Credit CardIn the race to develop intelligent machines, the leading AI companies have built bots that can whip up spreadsheets at a moment’s notice, write sophisticated code, and even solve long-standing math problems. But when it comes to the more mundane tasks of life—such as ordering groceries or booking flights—these tools sometimes still struggle. Now a new bot called Instinct is outperforming the AI giants.Instinct lets people ask for help with all kinds of tasks by texting the bot directly through iMessage or WhatsApp. Lately, it has been all the rage in the tech world. Online, people are breathlessly sharing examples of what they’ve gotten the tool to do. One person reported that he has turned to Instinct to pay tolls, book a DMV appointment, and even negotiate prices with vendors in India while he sleeps. Another says he used Instinct to ship an Apple Pencil he had left behind at a hotel in Montreal back to him in Brooklyn. Noah Shinn, a 23-year-old Northeastern University dropout, launched the product to a small test group earlier this year, and his company is already worth billions of dollars. As of Thursday, the company is reportedly seeking $1 billion in new funds, which could make it worth the equivalent of Lufthansa or Pinterest.Instinct isn’t the first AI personal assistant to draw attention this year. In the winter, the tech industry fawned over a similar tool called OpenClaw. But Instinct is comparatively much easier to use. Once you create an account, the bot can hook up to your credit cards and all kinds of digital services, including Slack, Google Workspace, and 1Password. Instead of finding a dinner recipe and opening up Instacart to manually add groceries, tell Instinct that you feel like making quiche Lorraine, and it can order groceries for you. But once AI tools start acting on people’s behalf in the real world, mistakes don’t just look like hallucinations. When AI agents have access to your email inbox and credit-card information, all sorts of strange things can go wrong.I downloaded the tool this week to test it out for myself. Using the bot feels a lot like texting an actual person. It uses emojis such as 🫡 and 👀to react to requests as it receives them, and the infamous three dots appear when it’s writing a response. Sometimes, the bot even leaves you on read while it works. (Compare that with ChatGPT,… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- AI’s Code-Red MomentFour days after a researcher publicly quit his job at Anthropic, warning that top AI firms are not “acting responsibly” and that their products might be on track to “kill us all,” the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, seemed to basically agree. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a 3,800-word essay that he published today on his personal website and posted to social media.By now, we’ve all become accustomed to AI industry figures issuing dire prophecies about the power of their products. Yet Amodei’s essay stands out for its urgency and for the moment at which it arrived. Worries about AI agents running amok have gone from hypothetical to real after OpenAI, Anthropic, and others reported alarming incidents in recent weeks. The question now is whether Amodei’s warning will have any more impact than past warnings, which is to say, any at all. There are reasons to believe it could.Amodei spelled out a three-step plan for what he called “pacing the frontier,” or tempering the speed at which top AI models improve in order to prioritize safety precautions. He argued that this would reduce the chances of things going awry—such as when an OpenAI model spawned swarms of AI agents that worked together in secret to hack into another company’s systems and cheat on an internal test. He said the top AI firms, including his own, are locked in a dangerous “race to the bottom” that could lead to more serious cyberattacks, such as a full takeover of the internet. He called instead for a “race to the top”—a phrase that President Obama once used for his education policy—in which firms vie to develop the safest models rather than the most powerful ones. “The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy,” Amodei wrote. “But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”The first step in his plan entails AI labs committing to bringing in outside monitors to look out for hazards; he said Anthropic will commit to that right now and hopes rivals will join. The second step involves AI firms in democratic countries agreeing—maybe with support from their governments—to certain limits and safety standards. The last and tallest order is “global coordination,” which mostly means getting China to buy in somehow. The tech world is divided on the China question:… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago
- Okay, Sure, a Folding iPhoneNothing quickens the pulse of an Apple fan more than these three words: one more thing. Steve Jobs used the catchphrase to introduce the original iPhone in 2007. In his 15 years running the company, Tim Cook deployed it only a handful of times, including before his 2014 announcement of the Apple Watch. Today, nine days into his tenure as Apple’s CEO, John Ternus said the magic words. Apple’s next big invention, the company revealed at a launch event in Cupertino, is a $2,000 iPhone that sports—get ready—a “remarkable hinge.”This is the iPhone Duo, a foldable gadget that opens like a book to reveal a capacious 7.6-inch screen. Billed as the most versatile iPhone, it can be used in folded or unfolded form, and in split-screen or full-screen modes. The screen appears seamless when open, which is a clever engineering feat. Yet an iPhone that blossoms into an iPad Mini seems unlikely to change many lives—especially at the price of a MacBook Pro. And foldable smartphones have been on the market since Samsung popularized the category, in 2019. In the pantheon of “one more things,” the Duo feels like a dud.Apple also announced several other devices today, all pitched in superlative terms by executives to obligatory applause. The most interesting might be new versions of the Apple Watch that will listen for sounds such as sirens and doorbells, take notes on your conversations, or play back the past 15 seconds of what someone just said to you. (Exactly how all of that will work, and how well, is not yet clear.) There are also new AirPods with improved noise cancellation. The new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max—the ones that don’t fold—offer “the longest battery life in iPhone history and the most advanced pro-camera system ever,” the company said. They also come in “a sophisticated and unique new color,” which is burgundy.Apple may have once captured people’s imagination. Now it also captures a lot more of their money. On top of its hardware sales, the tech giant is raking in subscription fees to Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV, iCloud, and more. Earlier this summer, the company announced price hikes on many of its products and a leasing program in partnership with Klarna for anyone who blinks at the sticker prices. One thing it didn’t announce today was the base iPhone 18, or any of its other less… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- This Tiny E-Reader Is the Single Best Piece of Technology in YearsNo matter how you read it, The Power Broker is a serious undertaking. The paperback weighs as much as a brick; to avoid lugging around all 1,344 pages, people have cut it apart at the spine and chunked it into sections. Others have organized in-person Power Broker marathon readings that run continuously for three full days. I decided to try something else.Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent 10 hours paging through Robert Caro’s masterpiece on an e-reader the size of a credit card. It’s magnetic, and small enough to attach to the back of my iPhone without adding any real bulk to my pocket. (Yes, this does mean that I have a screen on the back of another screen.) It’s called the Xteink X3, and at a glance, it looks like a cheap gimmick: more electronic junk made by unknown brands and sold on Temu and TikTok Shop—the kind of thing influencers are always hawking. (Can I interest you in a programmable LED hat for $11.60? Or how about $20 AirPod look-alikes made by “Fhumsh”?)In a sense, it is that. Xteink sounds less like a real brand name than the kind of garbled text you’ll find in AI-slop memes. (Speaking of which, the official website of the China-based company is full of AI-generated photos of people posing with the device.) And indeed, since the X3’s release on Amazon in May, TikTokers and YouTubers have raved about how the device is a steal and you should buy it right now—just click the link in bio.[From our August 2026 issue: The end of reading is here]And so I did. On Amazon, the X3 is $69 and tops the “hot new releases” list for e-readers, beating out a slew of Kindles. In person, the Xteink is many things: plasticky. Flawed. Finicky. Nevertheless, it is the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years. In the two months before getting this cartoonishly tiny e-reader, I finished only one book. In one month with the X3, I read three books without even really trying—and my iPhone’s average daily screen time dipped by 25 minutes.The X3 is great because of its size, not in spite of it. (For once, “fun-size” actually lives up to the billing.) Because this is such a runt of a device, you can stick it to your phone and have an e-reader in your pocket at all times.… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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